Intelligent design (ID) is a scientific theory that employs the methods commonly used by other historical sciences to conclude that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. ID theorists argue that design can be inferred by studying the informational properties of natural objects to determine if they bear the type of information that in our experience arises from an intelligent cause. The form of information that is produced by intelligent action, and thus reliably indicates design, is generally called “specified complexity” or “complex and specified information” (CSI).

On this page you can download an annotated bibliography of peer-reviewed and peer-edited scientific articles supporting, applying, or arising from the theory of intelligent design. You also can read a description of the intelligent design research community and its aims.

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Submit a peer-reviewed paper for inclusion on this page.

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Bibliography of Peer-Reviewed and Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design.

Download the full bibliography in PDF format.

Intelligent Design Research Community

There are multiple hubs of ID-related research. For details see our Research Home Page. ID researchers have published their work in a variety of appropriate technical venues, including peer-reviewed scientific journals, peer-reviewed scientific books (some published by mainstream university presses), trade-press books, peer-edited scientific anthologies, peer-edited scientific conference proceedings and peer-reviewed philosophy of science journals and books. These papers have appeared in scientific journals such as Journal of Theoretical Biology, PLOS One, BIO-Complexity, Journal of Bacteriology, Journal of Molecular Biology, Journal of Mathematical Biology, Complexity, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Life, Entropy, Quarterly Review of Biology, Frontiers in Bioscience, Acta Biotheoretica, Biomimetics, Biomimetics and Bioinspiration, Systems Engineering, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Journal of BioSemiotics, Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Protein Science, Physics Essays, Physica Scripta, Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, Journal of Engineering Design, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Annual Review of Genetics, and others. Collectively, this research is converging on a consensus: many complex features of life and the universe cannot arise by unguided processes (e.g., Darwinian evolution), but indicate an intelligent cause. This body of work also shows that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific field worthy of consideration by the scientific community. Many of these peer-reviewed pro-ID publications are listed and described below.

Despite ID’s publication record, we note parenthetically that recognition in peer-reviewed literature is not an absolute requirement to demonstrate an idea’s scientific merit. Darwin’s own theory of evolution was first published in a book for a general and scientific audience — his Origin of Species — not in a peer-reviewed paper. Nonetheless, ID’s peer-reviewed publication record shows that it deserves — and is receiving — serious consideration by the scientific community.

The purpose of ID’s research program is thus to engage open-minded scientists and thoughtful laypersons with credible, persuasive, peer-reviewed, empirical data supporting intelligent design. And this is happening. ID has already gained the kind of scientific recognition you would expect from a young (and vastly underfunded) but promising scientific field. The scientific progress of ID has won the serious attention of skeptics in the scientific community, who engage in scientific debate with ID and attend private scientific conferences allowing off-the-record discussion with ID proponents.

Selected List of Peer-Reviewed Scientific Publications Supportive of Intelligent Design

The list below provides bibliographic information for a selection of the peer-reviewed scientific publications supportive of intelligent design published in scientific journals, conference proceedings, or academic anthologies:

• Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004) (HTML).
• Michael J. Behe, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 85(4):1-27 (December 2010).
• Douglas D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 341:1295–1315 (2004).
• Michael Behe and David W. Snoke, “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues,” Protein Science, Vol. 13 (2004).
• William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol. 14 (5):475-486 (2010).
• Ann K. Gauger and Douglas D. Axe, “The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2011(1) (2011).
• Ann K. Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela F. Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, “Reductive Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2010 (2) (2010).
• Winston Ewert, “AminoGraph Analysis of the Auditory Protein Prestin From Bats and Whales Reveals a Dependency-Graph Signal That Is Missed by the Standard Convergence Model,” BIO-Complexity, 2023: 1 (2023).
• Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjer, “Estimating the information content of genetic sequence data,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C: Applied Statistics, 2023: qlad062 (2023).
• Richard S. Gunasekera, Komal K. B. Raja, Suresh Hewapathirana, Emanuel Tundrea, Vinodh Gunasekera, Thushara Galbadage, and Paul A. Nelson, “ORFanID: A web-based search engine for the discovery and identification of orphan and taxonomically restricted gens,” PLOS One, 18 (10): e0291260 (2023).
• Stuart Burgess, Alex Beeston, Joshua Carr, Kallia Siempou, Maya Simmonds, and Yasmin Zanker, “A Bio-Inspired Arched Foot with Individual Toe Joints and Plantar Fascia,” Biomimetics, 8 (6): 455 (2023).
• Olen R. Brown and David A. Hullender, “Neo-Darwinism must Mutate to survive,” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 172: 24-38 (2022).
• Ola Hössjer, Günter Bechly, and Ann Gauger, “On the waiting time until coordinated mutations get fixed in regulatory sequences,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 524: 110657 (2021).
• Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjer, “Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 501: 110352 (September 21, 2020).
• Ola Hössjer and Ann Gauger, “A single-couple origin is possible,” BIO-Complexity, 2019: 1 (2019).
• Ola Hössjer, Günter Bechly, and Ann Gauger, “Phase-type distribution approximations of the waiting time until coordinated mutations get fixed in a population.” Chapter 12 in: Silvestrov, S., Malyarenko, A. & Rancic, M. (eds): Stochastic Processes and Algebraic Structures – From Theory Towards Applications. Volume 1: Stochastic Processes and Applications. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics and Statistics, 271: 245-313 (2018).
• Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, “Mendel’s Paper on the Laws of Heredity (1866): Solving the Enigma of the Most Famous ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in Science,” eLS (Jon Wiley & Sons, 2017).
• Paul A. Nelson and Richard J.A. Buggs, “Next Generation Apomorphy: The Ubiquity of Taxonomically Restricted Genes,” in Next Generation Systematics, ed. Peter D. Olson, Joseph Hughes, and James A. Cotton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 237-263.
• Dustin J. Van Hofwegen, Carolyn J. Hovde, and Scott A. Minnich, “Rapid Evolution of Citrate Utilization by Escherichia coli by Direct Selection Requires citT and dctA,” Journal of Bacteriology, 198 (7): 1022-1034 (2016).
• David W. Snoke, Jeffrey Cox, and Donald Petcher, “Suboptimality and Complexity in Evolution,” Complexity, 21(1): 322-327 (September/October, 2015).
• Jonathan Wells, “Membrane Patterns Carry Ontogenetic Information That Is Specified Independently of DNA,” BIO-Complexity, 2014: 2 (2014).
• Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, “Mutagenesis in Physalis pubescens L. ssp. floridana: Some further research on Dollo’s Law and the Law of Recurrent Variation,” Floriculture and Ornamental Biotechnology, 1-21 (2010).
• Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukov, “The ‘Wow! Signal’ of the terrestrial genetic code,” Icarus, Vol. 224 (1): 228-242 (May, 2013).
• Joseph A. Kuhn, “Dissecting Darwinism,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, Vol. 25(1): 41-47 (2012).
• Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, pp. 3047-3053 (October, 2009).
• Douglas D. Axe, Brendan W. Dixon, Philip Lu, “Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints,” PLoS One, Vol. 3(6):e2246 (June 2008).
• Kirk K. Durston, David K. Y. Chiu, David L. Abel, Jack T. Trevors, “Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Vol. 4:47 (2007).
• David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models,” Physics of Life Reviews, Vol. 3:211–228 (2006).
• Frank J. Tipler, “Intelligent Life in Cosmology,” International Journal of Astrobiology, Vol. 2(2): 141-148 (2003).
• Michael J. Denton, Craig J. Marshall, and Michael Legge, “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms: New Support for the pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 219: 325-342 (2002).
• Stanley L. Jaki, “Teaching of Transcendence in Physics,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 55(10):884-888 (October 1987).
• Granville Sewell, “Postscript,” in Analysis of a Finite Element Method: PDE/PROTRAN(New York: Springer Verlag, 1985).
• A.C. McIntosh, “Evidence of design in bird feathers and avian respiration,”International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Vol. 4(2):154–169 (2009).
• Richard v. Sternberg, “DNA Codes and Information: Formal Structures and Relational Causes,” Acta Biotheoretica, Vol. 56(3):205-232 (September, 2008).
• Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig and Heinz Saedler, “Chromosome Rearrangement and Transposable Elements,” Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 36:389–410 (2002).
• Douglas D. Axe, “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 301:585-595 (2000).
• William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Again, for a more complete list of peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific publications, please download the full bibliography.